Tag: Ayodhya

December 6th, 2017: Down one of several stone-flagged lanes that toddle off Marienplatz, Munich town hall plaza, there still operates a rather prosperous enterprise called the Hofbrauhaus. It’s one of several kindred addresses around the area pledged to the central Bavarian celebration – the ooze and oomph of beer. They are all, each one of them, establishments of gregarious hubbub – voluptuous symphonies bound about their high-arched halls, beermaids shuffle about the tables with their jugfuls, decanting foaming oceans of the house brew. The floors tinkle, with glass and unrestrained merriment.

Hofbrauhaus is one of them and a little apart. It is patronized for more than just its beer and knucklewurst. Hofbrauhaus is where Adolf Hitler made his first address to the Nazi party in 1920. Through the flaming decades that followed, Hofbrauhaus remained a celebration of Nazi ways and values, and that’s partly what gets Hofbrauhaus its bloated clientele today. It’s a slice of Hitler. But a forbidden slice. You’ll find no trace of him or his creed. Nobody so much as whispers Adolf on the precincts, god forbid Hitler, or actually German law. Germany has institutionalized provisions called Volksverhetzung, or incitement of hatred, which prohibit all Nazi symbols, totems, hate speech, incitement, anything that is a reminder of Hitler. It’s a custom strictly adhered to in Germany.

It comes from the fear and the determination of no repetitions.

It comes from regret that’s yet unrelieved.

Most of all, it comes from a deep and collective sense of shame at the unspeakable horrors Germany and Germans once feistily brought upon. Nie Wieder, never again.

Regret can relieve wrongdoing; it implies admission of turpitude and, more pertinently, an undertaking of corrections and probably also a pledge of no repetitions.

In the 25 years since Ayodhya’s Babri Masjid was razed, our discourse has been hauled in the opposite direction – from shuddering shame to the discarding of that shame and the adoption of audacities that undermine the fundamental underpinnings of India and its Constitution.

Many might be tempted to think his tears are a tactic in the larger scheme of softening down his “hardliner” image. The man himself reckons they are an embarrassment he’d rather not display, at least to the public eye. But somehow, L K Advani, would be prime minister, just can’t shake off his lachrymal lapses, the last just a couple of days ago when businesswoman Swati Piramal read out a couplet at Assocham’s annual meet in New Delhi.

But it’s fair to say that this latest outburst had nothing to do with the image makeover Advani is desperately seeking in order to make his candidacy for the top executive job more acceptable.

The man who once sought to fashion himself as Sardar “Iron Man” Patel Mark II is a serial crier of established vintage. He had told The Telegraph in an interview as far back as 1991: “Tears come to my eyes so readily that I often feel embarrassed about this weakness of mine…”

A brief history of Advani’s crying (The Public Episodes):

– During a speech to felicitate Atal Behari Vajpayee’s accession to prime ministership at Parliament Annexe in 1996;
– On being told by a reporter in 1998 that since he became union home minister, he was being missed at the BJP headquarters;
– Watching his daughter Pratibha refer to him as a soft man with an unfair “hardliner” tag on live television;
– While watching Aamir Khan’s “Taare Zameen Par”, several times, we are told. And several times while watching several other movies that he is a huge fan of.

Medics would tell you that as you get older, most people tend to suffer what’s known as the dry-eye syndrome which is, essentially, a shortfall in the supply oftears. With Advani, 81, that’s clearly not the case. The older he gets the more he seems to have of tears.

Physiologists might have an explanation. A predisposition to frequent shedding of tears triggered by emotions could be attributed to an overactive sympathetic nervous system, the aspect of human brain physiology that mediates response to stress or joy. “An overactive sympathetic nervous system can cause outbursts of emotions — from stress and from intense joy,” said Ramesh Bhat, the head of physiology at the Kasturba Medical College, Mangalore. “An overactive sympathetic nervous system could have genetic basis.”

Although several animals produce tears, scientists believe it is only in humans that emotions can activate the tear glands. Physiologists have classified tears into three classes — basal tears that lubricate the eye, reflex tears that are caused by irritant chemicals such as tear gas or even onions, and emotional tears.
A number of studies suggest that emotional weeping through tears is healthy. Medical scientists say emotional tears observed across human cultures represent a protective mechanism to counter effects of stress. “It is an important outlet to relieve stress,” Bhat said.

Such tears may be stimulated by stress, and emotional experiences. (For Advani earlier this week, it may have been a couplet). One study in Japan found that the emotion-laden movie Kramer vs Kramer led 44 out of 60 participants to tears.
In other situations, scientists have observed dramatic physiological responses from even music. In one experiment, researchers at the Institute of Music Physiology and Hanover University in Germany found that a specific score from Mozart stimulated goose bumps and shivers in 7 out of 38 volunteers.

In Advani, tears get jerked by many and more of the abovementioned causes. As he told The Telegraph all those years back: “Any intense emotion, whether joy or sorrow, immediately moistens my eyes. Even a moving piece of dialogue in a film, or for that matter, fulsome praise showered on the BJP by an outsiders, or news of some outstanding achievement by a near and dear one brings tears to my eyes.”
Ayodhya and its aftermath and Gujarat 2002 evidently don’t qualify.

This piece was first published in the Indian Express in December 2002, the tenth anniversary of the demolition of the Babri Masjid

Sankarshan Thakur, Indian Express AYODHYA

You will go back disappointed, said the former Raja of Ayodhya. Nothing here ten years later, he said, the action was further west, in Gujarat, where Babri VIPs were lining up to cheer their new hero. So Sankarshan Thakur and photographer Prashant Panjiar let Ayodhya’s residents tell their stories: from an ailing architect of the Ramjanmabhoomi movement to boys who sell Babri demolition cards they can’t read. From a Muslim shoemaker who watched his shop burn to a mason who’s chipping away at the pillars of a very real and, at the same time, a very imagined temple.

The time was about right, we were told, but we had got the place terribly wrong. However could we have mixed up Godhra with Ayodhya? That is where it is all happening this year, isn’t it, in Gujarat, that last surviving fortress where a make or break battle rages. In Ayodhya it was going to be all symbolic and this time, unlike December 6, 1992, they honestly meant it. There weren’t enough of them around to manage anything beyond the symbolic. Continue reading ““What Do You Do, Even the Gods are Locked in Dispute””→